


World Attracting World, With Mutual Love

by akathecentimetre



Series: A Gentleman's Agreement [1]
Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Agreements, London, Long-Term Relationship, M/M, MRIs, World War II, discovery of magic, goblin attack, magical research, occasional blood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-25
Updated: 2017-09-15
Packaged: 2018-12-19 06:49:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11892312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akathecentimetre/pseuds/akathecentimetre
Summary: Abdul Haqq Walid moved to London in August of 1980, alone but for a suitcase and a sense of optimism that the South, at least, would be warm-ish. Among the things he left behind - with varying levels of regret - were his family, the Kirk, three years of a bewilderingly fascinating and demanding medical degree, daily drinking, an earring, and a faintly distressing number of denim jackets festooned with proof of his adoration of the Clash, the Blockheads, and the Nips. From a distance, a sane adult observer would probably think that he and his cohort were all destined for burnout.And then he met a wizard, and decided he wouldn’t leave for all the world.2 - In which an encounter with a goblin convinces Abdul not to waste any more time.3 - In which Thomas is shot, Abdul pulls receipts, and Peter kicks himself for being a blind idiot.





	1. Chapter 1

1  


**December, 1980**

Abdul Haqq Walid moved to London in August of 1980, alone but for a suitcase and a sense of optimism that the South, at least, would be warm-ish. Among the things he left behind - with varying levels of regret - were his family, the Kirk, three years of a bewilderingly fascinating and demanding medical degree, daily drinking, an earring, and a faintly distressing number of denim jackets festooned with proof of his adoration of The Clash, the Blockheads, and the Nips. His tastes hadn’t changed, generally speaking – but he and his fellow medical migrants were all a bit young and a bit overawed by the capital despite the permanent Scottish chips on their shoulders, and when he fetched up in a bedsit in Soho which he shared with three other internists the need to impress their instructors in their residencies meant they all became a bit square in the effort of making sure they won the ravenous ratrace that would (hopefully) end in a post in a prestigious department.

He liked London, as it turned out. He liked its community spirit, such as it was, glumly and begrudgingly given; he liked the University College Hospital’s cruciform building and the rabbit warren of rooms within it where he ran himself ragged; he occasionally liked hanging around the edges of Bowie nights at the Billy’s club and walking his way home in the dark, safely sober and listening to the thud of music and laughter leaking out of windows. And London liked him in return, which made everything much easier to bear – his name had preceded him slightly, as names from Edinburgh’s school of medicine tended to do, thanks to his managing to co-author a few papers as an undergraduate, and so he was both condescended to and challenged almost beyond his endurance in his first stint as a general physician; his flatmates, in similar straits, were genial and laddish and easily loved or ignored; and his patients were intriguing and infuriating and kept him smiling, for the most part, through his long days of working towards being able to turn back to his specialty of gastroenterology and run for the hills with it.

From a distance, a sane adult observer would probably think that he and his cohort were all destined for burnout, but Abdul couldn’t help but thrive. And then he met a wizard, and decided he wouldn’t leave for all the world.

It was an innocuous enough start. Parts of his interminable shifts were often based in the hospital’s teaching clinic, which was open to the public for everything from emergency care to checkups. It was a quieter morning, grey and overcast, in December when Abdul picked up his appointment roster to find himself faced with an ingrown toenail, a complaint of ‘unusual’ bowel movements – a euphemistic term which could refer to any manner of evils – and a middle-aged gentleman in a tailored suit sitting motionless in a corner of the waiting room, bundled up against the cold in a scarf and overcoat, and carrying a handsome silver-headed cane, who declined to name his complaint.

The patient with the toenail issues was just persistently inane; the sweaty man with the bowel complaint, on the other hand, turned out to be in serious pain and have a rigid abdomen, for which Abdul didn't hesitate to prescribe an emergency surgery for the purposes of exploration and possible appendectomy. He was just annoyed enough by being shut out of the operating theatre with the tart rejection that he was 'Just a bloody internist, and I don't care how many bowel resections you've done' that it took him longer than he should have to circle back around to the clinic and remember that he did, in fact, have another case waiting for him.

"My apologies for the delay," he said as he pulled back the curtain, absentmindedly glancing through the questionnaire the nurse had filled out for Nightingale, Thomas, male, aged forty-five. " I'm Dr. Walid. What seems to be the trouble?"

"I was rather hoping you could tell me." The voice was quiet and sardonic, and somehow managed to be friendly and condescending at the same time; Abdul, slightly startled, looked Nightingale up and down. He had taken off his long coat and was sitting primly upright in a listing chair next to the examination table, and looked rather like he wanted to be anywhere else.

"You might have to be more specific," Abdul said, half-smiling. "I can treat symptoms, but if it's fortune-telling you're after you might have to try Soho."

Nightingale considered this for a moment, then nodded. "I've been feeling – better."

"Better?" Abdul asked blankly.

"Better than I should for my age and expected physical condition," Nightingale said slowly. "I would appreciate your professional opinion as to my general state of health."

"Hm," Abdul said, and then, deciding that he could at least use this as one of his more interesting training moments when it came to dealing with the general public, shrugged and lifted the loop of his stethoscope over his neck. "Fair enough."

His lungs were clear, as were his eyes and ears; Abdul could detect no unusual cysts or calcifications in the skin and bones he was able to get at, and his spine was straight. About the only abnormality he found, in fact, was a scar, deep under smoother tissue but still purple and twisted, on the right side of Nightingale's trim ribcage.

"What's this?"

"War wound."

Abdul grimaced in sympathy; he hadn't heard of British troops being involved openly in Vietnam, but he could imagine that covert operations must have taken place, and Nightingale's upright, staccato bearing suddenly made a lot more sense. "Do you smoke?"

"Yes."

"You shouldn't," Abdul said automatically, and nodded at Nightingale to pull his shirt back down again as he noted the vice on his chart.

"Walid," Nightingale said thoughtfully, ignoring Abdul's advice, which he intended to reiterate far more sternly. "When did you convert?"

"Two years ago, in university," Abdul said, taking the same mild tone he had learned to adopt through what felt like hundreds of interactions which were inevitably followed by the much more suspicious and penetrating _Why?_ But Nightingale, with an aspect of acceptance which Walid was to realize was integral to the man, didn't ask - he simply nodded, and so Abdul didn't have to drag out the cheerily deflective joke about deciding he was tired of waking up in a pile of whiskey-felled fellow students morning after dreary, dark, Scottish morning, and that Islam's mandated abstinence seemed a good place to start.

Over time, he almost came to regret Nightingale's damned English politeness. It meant he didn't have to use that line; it also meant he didn't talk about Khushi's, about how the restaurant had smelled and the food had tasted when he'd needed something to soak up the previous night of Oban-fueled indulgence. How he'd come to think of scrubbing up for the operating theatre as a form of _wudu_ , readying his body and soul for the work of Allah. How much it had meant to be hiking to the top of the Corbett Creach Bheinn and find a surah praising God's work in nature rising into his mind.

Thomas would have understood those things, he thought. And he would have been happy to say them within Thomas's hearing. But Thomas never asked.

He _did_ ask 'why gastroenterology,' which Walid was more than happy to answer, even if he always felt a bit foolish saying it, far more unsure than he ever felt about his faith. There's something about the gut, he'd said. How irritable it can be, how ravenous it always is. How it runs your life in ways far more visible and knowable and primal than the brain ever seems to.

How it's always led him right, he said; and then he finally realized what it was his own gut had been trying to tell him, about how everything that seemed right here might actually be wrong, and flipped back to the first page of Nightingale's chart.

"This says you were born in 1900," he said, and blinked. "Did the nurse get that wrong?"

"No," Nightingale said, and Walid realized that there was something as nervous and careful in his patient as there suddenly was curling behind his sternum.

"So that bullet wound - ?"

"Germany. 1945."

"Shit," Walid said, and sat abruptly down, thinking about too many things. 

***

It took him nearly a week to wheedle his way into the Folly. Not that he'd known that that was what it was, of course - it was just the address Nightingale had provided on his medical forms, and given its placement off of Russell Square Walid might have expected to simply find an eccentric aristocrat with good genes on the other side of the door.

But his gut was still telling him that it was more than that, so he stood outside in the cold in front of the two handsome mahogany doors and knocked. And knocked, and knocked, and was resolutely not answered: not when he slid a piece of paper with a polite request for entry under the jamb saying he would be back at such-and-such a time on the following morning, not when he dashed back from frequent trips to the nearest off-license for terrible coffee in an effort to keep warm, and certainly not when there were lights on in the house and he knew Nightingale could hear him. 

_Stubborn bastard, aren't y_ e? Abdul thought cheerfully at the end of his third numbing day of attempts in between shifts, as he ambled his weary way home.

On the fourth day of asking, he noticed that there was a face at an upper window of the house, and he stepped quickly back across the busy pavement as far as he dared without stepping into traffic and waved. He was surprised when the window opened; he was even more surprised to see that it was a young woman in a strange black-and-white getup, pale and pinched with what he hoped was just the chill weather.

"Hello," he called up, with his frozen hands stuck in his armpits. "Is your dad in?"

She laughed, instantly and silently, and only brought her hand up to her mouth as an afterthought - well after Abdul had caught sight of her extremely sharp teeth - and then primly shut the window again.

 _Oh_ , he thought blankly, and hurried home to think some more about what on earth he was actually doing.

The angels of his better nature failing to dissuade him, he was back again the following day - and this time when he rang the heavy doorbell it seemed as if Nightingale had been waiting for him, because the left-hand door opened almost instantly. 

"You're persistent."

"You ran out on your appointment," Walid said lightly. "It would be irresponsible of me not to fill out the entire questionnaire."

Nightingale looked him gravely up and down. "Molly says you saw her yesterday."

"Ah, so it is a her."

"Who knows?" Nightingale said cryptically, and then, with a sigh, he pulled the door open fully. "You'd better come in."

"So," Abdul said casually as he stepped into the foyer, carefully skirting a forbidding-looking and incongruous statue of Isaac Newton, keeping his eyes fixed on Nightingale's back. "You're eighty, then?"

"Give or take," Nightingale said, without turning around; then, when he spoke again, there was a dry, dark laugh in his voice. "Don't look at me like that."

"Like what?"

They'd reached a high-ceilinged, beautifully-proportioned central hallway, in the middle of which Nightingale did turn around, and raised one wary eyebrow. "Like you're planning on dissecting me," he drawled. "There's a reason why I'd had enough of doctors."

Abdul took his white-cold hands out of his coat pockets and held them out at his sides slightly, suddenly aware that the whole house seemed to be – _pressing,_ squeezing in on him from all sides. Or that's what it felt like, at least; maybe the air was just musty, but whatever it was, there was the scent of danger about the place, and an unmistakable warning.

"You want me to go? I'll go," he said, as calmly as he could. "I have no interest in harming you."

Nightingale frowned, and then seemed to catch wind of the same force which was making black spots start to dance in Abdul's eyes, because he wheeled sharply on a handsome wooden door leading out of the east side of the hall.

"Molly," he said firmly. "That's enough."

Reluctantly, the house let go its grip, and Abdul took a long, uninhibited breath. A moment later, Molly herself slithered out of wherever she'd been hiding herself, and Walid couldn't help but stare.

Nightingale let out a huff of amusement, and, a little self-consciously, scraped an errant piece of hair back off of his forehead. "Welcome to the Folly, Abdul Walid," he said. "I think we'd better sit down and talk."

In the second week of his visits, Nightingale let Abdul into the Folly's library, and it was as if all of his Christmases (or Ramadans, as the case may be) had come early. Learning proper Latin beyond the realms of the pidgen phrases he'd picked up in the course of his anatomical training was utter gobshite, but entirely worth it to read Newton ( _Newton!_ ) in the original, and there was enough material on zoological sightings (werewolves, bloody _effing_ werewolves) in the Folly's own archives to keep him occupied for years. He learned about occasional cases of magic affecting the body and its functions in life and death, and immediately signed up to do a stint in pathology at UCH once his current stint in general practice was over. He read about the abstract theory of _formae_ and the relationship between language and physical effect, and felt his lids grow heavy to the sound of thickly-phrased, muttered spells.

In the third week, he followed Nightingale down into the cellars and stared, continually amazed at the tangled mess of intrigue that was suddenly his life, as the wizard bombarded 1940s-era targets with fireballs. Walid tried to feel the heat of one of them as it went by – Nightingale had raised his eyebrows at most of his little experiments, but had also quickly learned that there was little he could say that would ever effectively dissuade Abdul from performing them – and got a nasty little ridge of burn scarring across his palm for his trouble.

"So, the war," Abdul said at one point, because there was really no better way to bring up the questions he desperately needed answered than to just toss them out like the grenades he suspected they were. "Were magicians heavily involved?"

"On all sides," Nightingale said, after a moment's pause. He had his sleeves rolled up, and was concentrating intently on sending multiple shots of flame through an ever-widening single hole in a black-painted stormtroopers silhouette. "The cream of British wizardry didn't come back."

Abdul nodded, pulling his knees a little closer in to his chest where he sat on the floor watching the demonstration, knowing there was little he could say to that. "And after the war?"

"The Folly was empty. I grew old." A pause. "Until I didn't."

"Damn," Walid sighed, and added another item to the ever-expanding list of topics that suddenly made up his _very_ heavy research agenda.

Six weeks after Nightingale's appointment, Abdul asked if Molly had ever had an appointment of her own; and, upon discovering she hadn't, decided to take what was probably his life and sanity in his hands and propose it to her.

"I'm not sure this is a good idea," Nightingale said uncertainly from where he was standing beside Walid's chair. Opposite them sat Molly, who stared narrow-eyed at the stethoscope in Walid's lap. She had taken only gradually to his presence as it became clear he wasn't going to stop coming; on the few occasions when Walid had eaten at the Folly, he'd been surprised and grateful to discover that she had somehow managed to get ahold of halal meats for his portions, which made him hope she was not opposed, at least, to the fact of his existence.

"Molly," he said gently, and lifted both hands towards her. "May I?"

She hesitated for a long time, looking rapidly back and forth between him and Nightingale; but eventually, with a little shake of her shoulders which perfectly conveyed her decisiveness, she leaned forward, put her chin into Abdul's palms, and opened her mouth.

Abdul had nightmares that night, but when he remembered the placement of her trust in him he couldn't help but smile.

"You haven't asked yet," Nightingale said abruptly one night about three months into Walid's investigations, on a night when Abdul had packed in three hours of time in the library on top of a full shift and was almost too tired to process human speech.

"Asked what?" he said clumsily, around a mouthful of succulent lamb which Molly had realized was a particular favorite of his.

"To be taught magic." Nightingale looked amused, as he often did when looking at Abdul, as though constantly surprised and relieved by his continued presence. "I ought to warn you that the position of apprentice remains closed."

Abdul swallowed, somewhat flabbergasted. "I hadn't thought it was ever open," he said slowly. "I've got more than enough on my plate without doing the work you do, I think."

"Then why?"

Abdul laughed then, really laughed, joyously, and then laughed some more, somewhat out of pity, at the look of incomprehension on Nightingale's face.

"You've shown me _magic_ ," he got out eventually. "What other earthly or godly reason would I need, man?"

They stayed up until one in the morning that night, debating the relative merits of theories about the existence of werewolves, and then Nightingale, with deep lines of thought in his face, reached over and gently grabbed hold of Abdul's wrist in one long-fingered hand.

"Quiet, now," he said, and the whole room grew dim in Abdul's sight. "Can you feel anything?"

Pine, Walid thought, his exhaustion and his keener senses all whirled up together. Canvas, and cigarette smoke, and teenaged boys running wildly through the woods.

"Yes," he breathed. "Is that _vestigia?_ "

"Of a sort," Nightingale said, and smiled. "I think your place in the hospital might prove very useful."

And then he leaned back, and kept on smiling, though he had let go of Abdul's hand. "You really should call me Thomas, you know."

"And you really should stop smoking," Abdul yawned, and fell asleep right there in his chair.

***

The MRI Scanner Mark One experiment, near the end of Abdul's first year of knowing the Folly, was perhaps the most fascinating of all; not least because it meant getting them both up to the University of Aberdeen and learning that Nightingale was a slightly terrifying, if very competent, driver, and that he seemed to know every host of every one of the finest B&Bs in England. The Mark One was the first full-body MRI device in the world, and Walid was generally absurdly proud of it being a Scottish invention; it had taken every favor and every connection to every prestigious tutor he'd ever had to book time with it, and when he saw it he was so excited he was almost incapable of speech.

Nightingale looked rather more unnerved, for which Abdul honestly couldn't blame him, since it did resemble some sort of torture device out of an alien contact film – not that Nightingale was likely to understand that sort of reference point. But something of Abdul's enthusiasm must have been contagious, because when Walid looked over at him he was being watched with a curious, half-sideways smile on Nightingale's face, and he hopped more gracefully than most up onto the gurney under the scanner with little prompting.

The images took a while to come through and be reproduced, but they were beautiful – both in and of themselves, and because Thomas's body looked for all the world like a pristine example of a healthy forty-year-old. Some calcification, a slight stoop to the shoulders – these were minor complaints and in no way detracted from the miracle of the man.

"Look at that brain," Walid cooed on the journey back in the Jag, somewhere near Durham, his accent broad with happiness as he pored over the folder of scans in his lap. "Pure dead brilliant. Do y'nae think?"

"I wouldn't understand it even at the tenth time of your explaining it," Nightingale said with a laugh, but he was smiling, and the fact that he appropriated Folly funds for another MRI a year later meant he had at least picked up enough of the science to appreciate its results.

This time, Walid was to put all the pathology he'd been poring over to good use, because when Nightingale called it was to summon him to UCH's morgue, and when he arrived there was a body waiting for him.

"Sidney Travers," Nightingale said, quietly, as Abdul put his bag gingerly down next to the table. "Veteran of Ettersburg. More recently, a collector of model trains and books about East Asia."

Abdul caught his breath, looked hard at Nightingale over the corpse, and then glanced down. To all intents and purposes, it was a normal-looking seventy-year-old man. He had grown a paunch, and the skin of his upper arms and jowls had become loose with age; he could have been anyone's grandfather.

"What do you want me to do?"

Nightingale inclined his head. His jaw, Abdul could see, was taut and twitching. "You wanted to examine the effects of magic on a practitioner’s body. Here is a sample."

"Did his family agree to an autopsy?"

"He had none left."

"Do _you_ agree to it?” Abdul said, more sharply than he’d intended.

The question hung in the air, and Walid suspected he knew the – negative – answer. But Nightingale just blinked, and shrugged a little, and looked so unbearably sad that Walid knew nothing he could say, in that moment, could ever counter it.

“At least he can be of use again,” Thomas said, eventually, and, with a small nod in Walid’s direction, he took his leave.

Abdul surprised himself with how squeamish he felt at his first full cadaver dissection. He’d practiced on dozens of corpses in school, of course, and put a fair number of the living under his microscopes and scalpels since then. But there was something different about the heavy, dead, stinking gut; about the slow and meticulous evisceration of everything which had, up until recently, added up to a living human being with a voice and a soul. His hands were working on instinct rather than according to much of a plan, and he was grateful when the gently dinging clock on the morgue wall gave him the excuse to retreat to his office for the noon prayer before he took a saw to Travers’ skull.

Once he got the skull open, all he could really do was stare.

“Impossible,” he muttered, and performed a highly unethical dash back up to his office again, leaving the body unattended, so he could bring down Nightingale’s scans and an enormous textbook full of delicate drawings of ganglia and brainstems in various states of ill-health.

He didn’t need an MRI to see the damage Travers had sustained. If it was magic, it was more vicious than any example of dementia Abdul had ever seen; he needed several long minutes to convince himself that his eyes weren’t tricking him, that Thomas’s scans were still bright and clear and free of the oozing, pitted whorls.

 _For now,_ some nasty part of his brain muttered, and in retrospect he would realize that this was the first time he had ever felt truly afraid for Nightingale’s life.

And that, in turn, made him feel like one of the brightest and precious things he had ever known was in danger of being taken away from him.

 _That, I will not abide_ , he thought sternly, and hurried to pack away his files and carefully restore Travers’ body to some sort of dignified state before sliding him quietly away and clattering out into the sticky summer afternoon.

He had a tutorial to teach before he could make it onto the Tube, and only arrived at the Folly close to suppertime. There was no answer for a few moments when he rang the bell; eventually, the doors swung open of their own accord, but no-one was behind them, and Abdul took a few careful steps inside only to find himself alone in the front hall, catching just a glimpse of the hem of Molly’s skirts swishing away behind the door to the kitchen and scullery.

He quietly called Thomas’s name, but when he received no answer, he hung up his coat in the foyer and walked purposefully into the library. He ran the tips of his fingers idly along the spines of the tomes he’d come to know well along the first set of bookshelves – the Newton, the eighteenth-century British theorists, the German historians – and proceeded on, towards the leather-bound record books of the Folly itself, searching for he didn’t know what, because he was unlikely to find x-rays and lists of blood types in a place as esoteric as this.

On the very bottom of the bookcase, closest to the ground, was a volume far slimmer than most of the other neatly-dated collections. He picked it up not expecting anything like medical records or observations, but got much more for his trouble – a horrifying, insidious excess of names, written in fading brown and black and blue ink, hands changing, dates climbing from the eighteenth century into the twentieth: dates of birth, names of schools, names of masters and apprentices.

Dates of death, pages and pages and pages of them, all written in the same elegant, familiar handwriting, with the same pen, dating from 1940 to 1946.

There was the sound of a distant door creaking, and Nightingale’s voice floated through to him. “Abdul, is that you?”

 _Oh, my sorrow_ , Abdul found himself thinking, unbidden. _And his eyes became white with grief because of the sorrow that he suppressed_.

The quranic quotation brought him little comfort, but it did convince him all the more, as he sat across from Thomas and Molly glided in to serve their formal dinner, that he was exactly where he was needed most.

*

**TBC**

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/Ns: 100% of the blame for this goes to M'Colleague Agarthanguide, whose [brilliant art](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4996429) is basically the facecast for my Walid (I'm also partial to Sebastien Roché or Tony Curran). The title comes from an excerpt of David Mallet's 1728 poem _The Excursion_ which waxes lyrical about Newton, and my soundtrack of choice for RoL in general, to which much of this was written, is Alexandre Desplat's _The Imitation Game_. More to come; thanks for reading!


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which an encounter with a goblin convinces Abdul not to waste any more time.

2

**September, 1990**

Abdul woke with a half-hearted, clumsy start, and coughed. Then he sniffed, swallowed blood, and coughed it back up again, his mouth full of gummy copper.

It took what felt like about a minute for his mind to start working again, by which point he'd already had the rather intense feeling that he was buggered, and realized that his face was going to need rather a lot of repair. His nose was probably broken, and he could feel his cheeks puffing up around it; there was at least one chip of tooth rattling around in his mouth, and it took him rather longer than he would have liked to force his eyes open. 

When he did, it was to the sight of the normally pristine sitting room of his newly-purchased house in tatters, and the tail of a muttering goblin wriggling behind the open door of his icebox.

Abdul choked, blinked, tried to sit up, failed, and told himself not to whimper when his back screamed its protest. _Right_ , he thought, and now his clarity was back but panic was quickly rising up to war with it. _Sample. Goblin heart. Here to take it back_.

He'd leave the rest of the story to the police, or to Nightingale, because he at least had been there when the shriveled, leathery heart had been discovered in a well-meaning local amateur paleontologist's collection, and he had given Walid his blessing to remove it, so that would save some time. Nightingale would probably _not_ have been pleased to learn that instead of storing it at UCH, Abdul had decided to just take it home - because it was late, because he wasn't sure the night porter at the hospital would let him in when he was supposed to be on a week away, because, because - whatever the petty, stupid reason which Walid would certainly not be indulging again if he managed to get out of this alive, the goblin heart was there, sitting quietly outside his back garden door in a jar in the cool autumn air, and something had come to take it back which clearly had no compunction about getting rid of _him_ in the process.

Or at least, it hadn't had any when it had barreled through the door that Walid had sleepily opened to it at half-one in the morning and put him through the wall of his front corridor. Which probably, Walid thought pathetically as he reached up a shaking hand and wiped plaster dust off of his throbbing cheek, had something to do with that back pain.

There was a snarl from the kitchen, and the sound of breaking glass; Walid blinked again, and time must have passed, because what he could see of his kitchen table and chairs was in splinters and his sofa no longer had any cushions and the goblin was standing over him in the half-light of the streetlamps coming in through the windows. It was about the size of a man, but not half so solid and identifiable - sometimes it seemed to have fur, and at other moments it had scales or a snout or six-inch claws. The only constant of it was a grimacing mouth full of very, very sharp incisors. 

"Where is it?" it hissed, its reptilian tail swaying.

Which is when Abdul decided to be a complete and utter idiot. In the name of science, you understand.

"Don't know what you’re talking about," he whispered, and then he did scream a bit as he was hauled up by the front of his ruined t-shirt.

"Liar," it hissed, and its voice was full of cunning, shifty cruelty. "I can eat the truth right out of you."

True to form, Abdul found himself massively intrigued – was the creature implying that magic could follow neural pathways in the brain that led to specific pre-determined pieces of information? – and would have asked it to expand on its method, but he never got the chance. A fireball through the sternum would stop most beings, Walid reckoned, and the look of momentary surprise on the goblin's face as Nightingale's attack bisected it seemed to prove as much. 

Abdul wheezed as he landed back on his feet, promptly fell on his arse, and scrabbled weakly away from the smoldering carcass until his back fetched up against the nearest wall and Nightingale had fetched up beside him, cold rage radiating off him and his werelight pulsing in his hand. He looked like an avenging angel, Walid thought, somewhat nonsensically, and reached up one hand on instinct to clutch at Thomas's lapel. 

"How?" he rasped.

"Late nights often yield magic," Nightingale said, evenly, his voice low and dangerous. He was looking at Abdul as though he were getting drunk on him, his gaze roving and piercing through him. "I heard your address mentioned on the old police scanner."

Abdul laughed, somewhat hysterically, which sounded and felt horrible. "You know my address?"

He didn't wait to hear Nightingale's answer - he just lifted his other hand to the other lapel and pulled Thomas in for what had to be the messiest kiss he'd ever given, which was saying something considering the sort of trouble his class at Edinburgh had gotten up to in the long winter evenings after lectures.

It also hurt, a lot, and so he let his head fall back again, let out a very Scottish-sounding 'acgh' sound of despair, and made sure, before he passed out, that he didn't let go of Thomas for a second. 

***

Abdul woke up in his own bed, which was a welcome surprise. A surprise, because he would have thought his injuries would have seen him straight off to UCH; welcome because, being a doctor, he knew what doctors were like and found himself grateful not to be under their ministrations.

He wasn't alone in his bed, either, though it was clear neither of them had gotten up to anything. Thomas was still in his trousers and shirtsleeves, turned away from him, tidy and polite even in sleep, and Walid only realized he was smiling when his cheeks began to sting. He took a cautious moment to stretch under the duvet, grimacing as he catalogued his aches and pains, and then slipped out of the bed to pray.

He looked a right shocker in his cracked bathroom mirror, even though his nose had been set and taped across its bridge and his teeth, while chipped, would be easily mended by a couple of fillings and crowns, their sharp edges already duller than he had feared. The goblin had clearly been in a vindictive mood, he thought grumpily - but the sputtering cold water he palmed across his skin for wudu cooled his bruises, and by the time he came back out of his ensuite he was feeling almost human. Gingerly, he used the side of a slippered foot to brush broken glass and pottery and ripped book pages into the corners of the bedroom, pulled his prayer rug back into his penciled mark on the floor that indicated the correct qibla, and knelt.

He was aware of Thomas being awake and watching him when he reached his second surah, but he paid him no heed - not for the moment, because although his face was throbbing with each prostration and his neck was telling him in no uncertain terms that he had to stop, he could feel himself growing calm. He was alive, and (relatively) well, and fairly certain he was loved: he would take a few moments of pain to demonstrate his thankfulness, and prepare himself for what might come next.

By the time he let out a long exhale and opened his eyes, he was alone again in the room and the bathroom door was closed. He got up, a little unsteady, and made his way out into the mercifully dead goblin-free sitting room, mournfully taking in his ruined bookshelves; there was one survivor, however, of which he was very glad, because although it was covered in dust and debris his record player was exactly what he needed right then. And so it was to the cheerful strains of Starcastle's 'Lady of the Lake' that Nightingale came out to find Abdul starting to sweep up the remnants of the kitchen with a half-shredded broom.

"Good morning," Thomas said gently, and then pulled a small bottle out of his pocket and handed it to Abdul. "Take three. Doctor's orders."

"Ta," Abdul nodded, and didn't even bother looking for an intact glass in the devastation, instead just popping the pills in his mouth and scooping up some water from the sink to get them down. "About that - ?"

"You made it very clear that you didn't want to go anywhere, in the few moments when you were conscious," Nightingale said. Amusement and worry were visibly chasing each other across his face. "You can be quite intimidating when you've made your mind up. I think the ambulance workers thought they were dealing with an escaped highlander."

"They'd be technically correct, though I'm not sure why that should be alarming," Abdul said, grinning.

"You alarm me," Thomas murmured, more seriously, and since he didn't move forward even though it looked like he wanted to, Abdul did instead.

"I'm sorry," he said, putting all his real sincerity behind it, and lifted one of Thomas's limp hands into his own. "I can't imagine what this put you through. I don't intend to ever be this careless again."

"What you put me through," Thomas repeated, half-disbelieving and not quite looking up. Abdul took a breath, told himself that he'd save his pitying and loving laughter for later, and half-pulled, half-stepped himself in close, winding one arm around Thomas's shoulder and sliding his cramped hand into half-curled hair. 

They stayed like that for quite some time - at one point Abdul realized he was humming along to Starcastle, or at least to some tune he thought was soothing - until Thomas lifted his face from Abdul's shoulder, let out an upwards sigh, and pressed a gentle kiss to Walid's jawline.

"Come to the Folly," he said quietly, which immediately sent Abdul's mind - only half-guiltily - down some very interesting paths. "You can't stay here in all this mess. I'll wait outside while you pack."

It only took a couple of minutes to wincingly dress himself and throw a few changes of clothes and his prayer rug into a hold-all. Nightingale drove the Jag with a vague, far-away look; every time he came to a stop and didn't need to change gears he reached out just to make sure Walid was there, and Walid let him, leaning back into his headrest and trying to make sure his presence was enough.

It was just getting properly light when they reached the Folly, and Molly met them in the entrance hall, her eyes flaring and whatever it was in her mouth wriggling in distress behind her cheeks as she took in Walid's face. It was a shock when she grabbed his hand and started dragging him towards the stairs - not only because he hadn't expected (but was pathetically grateful for) the hot bath she'd drawn for him in the oak-paneled and marble-tiled bathroom on the second floor, but because her hand was as cold as ice and woke him up like not even the realization that he was as much the Folly's as it was his had done.

"Thank you," he said as she ushered him into the steam. "And sorry," he added, and at the tilt of her head he just shrugged. "You'll find out."

She looked at him suspiciously, and a few minutes later Abdul heard a distant screech and what sounded like crockery breaking; he guessed he would be getting a very long and unpleasant silent treatment from her for being such an idiot and, however unintentionally, putting Nightingale in danger. But at that moment he couldn't care much, because he could very easily have fallen asleep in the heaven that was a real eighteenth-century copper bath whose water somehow - he suspected magic - refused to go cold.

He roused himself eventually, dripping, and emerged in jeans and with his holdhall dangling from his shoulder to find Thomas in a small library one door down the corridor, where he was pouring something that looked old and expensive out of a small decanter into an even smaller, very posh-looking glass.

"A bit early, isn't it?" Abdul asked as he fiddled with doing up the buttons on his shirt, feeling warm and uncertain and alien, for the first time in years, to the world he was in.

The look Thomas gave him was unequivocally sarcastic. "Is it?" he replied, and drained the glass in one go; when he put it down again the look on his face made Abdul realize, quite suddenly, that he hadn't blushed like a schoolboy in over a decade, because he was doing it then and it was decidedly more pleasant than he remembered it.

Abdul could have sung for joy when he saw that there was no longer anything hesitant about how Thomas approached him, or about the touch of his hands and mouth and what he clearly wanted, and when he felt the _vestigia_ of light and laughter and dim evenings as he followed Thomas to his unbearably Victorian bedroom, he thought he had a sense of just what sort of happiness they were returning to.

Afterwards, he slept straight through until the following morning. He dimly remembered waking in the middle of the night to swear loudly and filthily at the terrifying apparition of Molly standing in the doorway like something out of Stephen King - he also remembered a hand on his thigh, followed by Thomas laughing at him and telling him firmly to go back to sleep, and so he did.

***

Walid did move back out of the Folly eventually, but it took six months – a half-year that he would willingly admit was one of the most simply contented periods of his life.

He certainly didn't have any reason to leave, given that the food was good, the sex was fantastic, and he was enjoying his first serious period of time of being truly _desired_ since a couple of faux-passionate, intrinsically transient relationships he'd had in university. He was no longer the gangly, metabolically hyperactive twenty-one he had been when he'd first arrived in London; a decade later he had packed on adulthood at various places and with varying degrees of actual muscle mass around his person, and he was starting to feel crow's feet crinkling in the corners of his eyes when he smiled. He didn't consider himself a looker, but he also certainly didn't think himself a disappointment – and Thomas seemed to agree, because he seemed to spend every waking moment watching Abdul, now.  


And that was all that really mattered to Abdul, in those first long few weeks. It mattered to have someone awake and waiting for him as he swam up out of sleep, turned over, and pulled Thomas into his arms; it mattered knowing that he was making an empty house louder and brighter and a little less cold; it mattered that there were times when he could glance up from a book in the library and catch the most naked of looks on Thomas's face, the slight shades of wariness and uncertainty and want all overtaking each other, and be able to reach out and take fingers that had been waiting for him into his palm. To turn Thomas's hand over in his, and press his lips to the inside of a slim wrist, and lead him back up the stairs.

It turned out that Molly, too, was to make plain an alarmingly voracious curiosity for seeing Walid naked. He couldn't honestly blame her - for the sake of novelty alone, after living for more than forty years without having anyone but Nightingale for company - but after a long series of near-misses, he had to gently sit her down and try to explain, in his most technical and medical terms, the concept of privacy and the sense of extreme paranoia that could ensue from being watched in the bath from a distance of three feet by someone who suddenly appeared perched on a stool next to the edge of the tub as he came up for air, sharp-toothed and grinning. After quite a lot of persuasion, he managed to get her to retreat to the doorways of rooms when he was in any vulnerable state of undress, which he would take as a victory for the time being. 

Thomas laughed at him, a lot, when he realized all of that was happening, and didn't make a single move to help in the slightest. Lewd bastard. 

Abdul founded _Gut_ (or at least, planted the idea) while on the 1920s-era telephone in the Folly's foyer with an American he'd met in medical school, leaning back in a tattered armchair he'd dragged out from the library and laughing at how his colleague kept telling him to speak up, damn it, because whatever phone he was on sounded like it was underwater; somehow he doubted anyone had ever shouted at full tilt down the Folly's dusty corridors about duodenums, pancreatic juice and the sphincter of Oddi before, of which he was strangely proud. It felt like home, and he was loath to leave it. 

Thomas did hem and haw and look Englishly guilty about it all at times, but those moments were nothing Abdul couldn't swiftly rebut. Nightingale only muttered about being three times Walid's age once, over breakfast; Abdul could have easily imagined him saying it again, were it not for the rejoinder he'd prepared that that meant he must be three times as good at sex, then, and perhaps he should prove it. Thomas's face turned the most interesting color as Abdul went cheerily (and smugly) about buttering his toast, and he was rewarded for it later in what was indeed a most creative fashion.

Abdul was a scientist, after all. His devotion to experimentation extended into all things – and all places.

On his thirty-second birthday he spent much of the day in fasting and contemplation in a room which Molly had made up for him next to Thomas's, and only came down for dinner once the sun had set; Molly had laid out a veritable feast of a buffet, which he couldn't help but fall upon, and when Thomas entered he was clearly trying not to make too obvious an entrance in his three-piece suit of muted grey silk.

Thomas put a little black folded wallet of leather down next to Abdul's elbow before leaning in and snogging him thoroughly, which meant that it took a few minutes for Abdul to swim his happy way back to enough clarity once Thomas had sat down and begun his own meal to ask. "What's this?"

"Your birthday gift, should you want it," Thomas said, and Abdul could tell that he was putting rather more effort than usual into appearing his nonchalant self. "It's an experiment on my part as well, but it strikes me that the partnership on offer could be mutually beneficial."

Abdul wiped his fingers and picked up the folder; it was rather like the identification card he sometimes carried with him at the hospital, and so it proved to be. Only this one was from the Metropolitan Police, and declared Abdul Haqq Walid to be an accredited consultant, which – what on _earth?_

He'd apparently spoken those last words out loud, because Thomas smiled and looked rather relieved to be explaining it. "I've been speaking with the force often since the incident at your home," he started. "They were rather intrigued to be reminded of my existence. There's an oath, you see," he said, and then ran out of steam a bit, and seemed perplexed. "Well, it's a bit complicated.

"The point is," he continued, forging gamely on as Abdul kept staring at the warrant card, "the Met have seen fit – God only knows why – to reinstate the Folly as a division of the force, and give me a title. My duties remain unclear, but if I'm going to be looking at crime scenes that are influenced by magic I can't imagine a better pathologist to have with me than you."

"Because I'm the only one qualified?" Abdul said finally, grinning over the table.

Thomas harrumphed, and had the decency to blush. "That too."

Abdul felt full, of dinner and of the house and of everything, and found himself, unexpectedly, not very able to speak.

"Thank you," he managed to say eventually, rougher than he'd meant to, and when Thomas raised a concerned eyebrow at him he just got up from his chair, came around the edge of the table, and returned what had been his real gift, which Thomas enthusiastically reciprocated.

***

It was 1993, and Abdul had his own house again (thanks to the pressures of that weary triumvirate of work, time, and appearances) but was never more devoted to the life and work that was Thomas Nightingale, when he was brought his most serious practitioner-related case of them all.

Dr. Lewis of UCH was a curmudgeonly old Welshman who made no bones about being old and curmudgeonly, and certainly took a lot of obvious pride in being Welsh if his home-embroidered doctor's coats with their spitting dragons on the lapels were anything to go by. He had also been Walid's tutor in pathology on and off over the years, and a finer appreciation of the stranger things about the human body you'd be hard pressed to find. Given Abdul's occasional but unquestioned curiosity of the art, he had made it a habit of calling him whenever something odd came up in the morgue, which, over the years, had revealed a fae or two, a possible chimera, and at least one – as yet unsolved – murder involving a man whose face had been extremely neatly burnt off, the front of his skull razed down to a flat top. And when he called up to Abdul's increasingly-cluttered office in the spring of '93, he sounded more than a little fascinated.

" _Good one for you to sink your teeth into_ ," he said quickly down the line. " _Mass burial found under a building site. The first one just arrived._ "

Abdul walked into the lab a few minutes later, wriggling into his coat, to find Lewis and his unruly grey hair perched over the tattered, dusty remnants of what could barely even be named a man. Even from the doorway, Abdul could tell that the flesh was partly mummified, and smelled like moldy paper; the corpse was contorted and shrunken, hands and partly-skeletal feet bent into agonizing claws.

"Quite a find, eh?" Lewis said, spotting Abdul and waving him over. "The bomb disposal squaddies are down at the building in Camden now – we won't be getting any more for a while, so let's get started on this sad bugger."

"Bomb disposal?" Abdul said, frowning as he pulled on a pair of gloves.

"Aye," Lewis said, picking carefully at a rotted arm with the tip of a scalpel. "Incredible story. Builders were digging down a basement and found this 'un and a dozen others all packed into a mess of brickwork – and then they realized there was a ruddy great unexploded bomb hanging over their heads. From the war, probably. Poor bastards got buried during the Blitz, and no one ever found them until now."

Abdul paused, thought carefully for a moment, and then, with a deep breath, closed his eyes.

He felt it almost immediately. The pressure of the air, and the silence before it hit, and the scattering of playing cards and the breaking of bones -

\- and a werelight, in the darkness, floating in the dust, desperately wanting to be seen, to bring them help, to please, _please, get us out –_

He couldn't help it – he swayed, and clutched at the edge of the table, and when he forced his eyes open again and got past the dizziness it was to the firm grip of Lewis's hand on his elbow, reaching out across the table to make sure he didn't fall face-first into the corpse.

"Bloody hell, Walid," Lewis said, eyes wide. "You all right?"

Abdul reached his free hand into his pocket. "Are the police at the building site?"

"Well," Lewis said, his face creasing in confusion. "Of course, but I didn't hear they were doing more than blocking the place off now that the bomb’s been made safe. It's hardly a suspicious death fifty years on."

"Call them," Abdul said firmly, "and tell them to shut the place down. Only specialists allowed in. And then you call this number - " he was reaching for Lewis's clipboard, scribbling the Folly's number with the nearest pen - "and tell DCI Thomas Nightingale to meet me there immediately, without fail."

"On whose authority?" Lewis said, starting to sound exasperated.

"On this," Abdul said, too worried to be polite, and flashed his warrant card in the astonished doctor's face.

He didn't have the time, or the nerve, to feel suave about his newfound power as he rushed out of the hospital and made his way to Clerkenwell Street. At its corner with Hatton Garden, a half-handsome brick building was covered up with rickety-looking scaffolding, and the pavement around it was blocked off by more than twenty metres, the bored construction crew and a few constables in their pointed helmets loafing around and chatting as local residents who had clearly been evacuated due to the bomb milled around their now-safe doorways. In the distance, Abdul just caught sight of a truck clattering away with what looked like an enormous shell casing bouncing around in its bed; it was the remnants of the bomb, he realized, and the assembled crowed were too busy gawking at it to pay him much attention as he presented his warrant card to the sergeant guarding the front door and bluffed his way in on the back of his degree, eventually finding himself standing at the top of a crooked flight of stairs leading down into a brightly-lit cellar.

The grave was two stories down, and confusing, all mixed up as it was with the debris of removing the bomb and the mess the construction crew had made – but the basic facts of it were undeniable. There was a massive hole in the brick and earthenware floor, and below, a few feet underneath the crevasse in the sidewall that must have been where the bomb had stuck itself, was a tangled morass of half-clad bones.

Said bones screamed at him, urgently and as fresh as if they'd been buried alive yesterday, and Abdul gasped, crouched quickly down on his heels, and pinched at the bridge of his nose, willing it to pass.

"Who're you?"

It was a woman, Abdul saw when his vision finally cleared – unhealthily skinny, with a severe salt-and-pepper bob of hair and small, intelligent eyes which looked more than capable of telling him to fuck right off. Down in the grave, another figure clad in a plastic suit looked up at the sound of her voice; this was a man, young and blond over his facemask, who looked nothing more than curious at Abdul's presence. He had a gaping skull held gently in his hands.

"Dr. Walid. Police consultant," he managed to say, brushing his hands off on his jacket and getting up to offer one to her. "I do occasional pathology for specialist cases."

"Hm," she said skeptically, but took his hand nonetheless. "Professor Sarah Hawes, out of Birmingham University. That down there is my student Kevin Higginbottom."

"Hiya," Kevin said, and stepped carefully over an outstretched tangle of legs to the ladder he and Hawes had set up in a corner of the ditch, reaching up to hand her the skull. "That's ten, all detached. Not going to get much further with identification until we start on the clothing."

He looked up at Walid, pulling his mask off his face to reveal a pleasant, open smile, the face of a young Oxbridge lad with too much money and an unexpectedly large amount of heart. "Any news on what this was, Dr. Walid? The police said they'd need to do some archival work to determine missing persons leads."

"They tried to keep it from going off."

Abdul hadn't heard Thomas coming, and he wasn't sure if he wanted to hear more or if he had made a terrible, terrible mistake in asking him there. Nightingale's face was pale and rigid with finality, standing at the bottom of the stairs in his perfect suit, his cane gripped hard in his hand as he stared into the pit.

"They tried to keep it from going off," Thomas said again, in a horrible monotone, "and they succeeded."

He looked at Walid, and something that only Abdul could see broke in him. "They succeeded, Abdul."

"Who did?" Professor Hawes said, clearly a little unnerved – and Abdul couldn't blame her. Nightingale turned on her gently, with a dim smile that was almost more painful to see than his blankness.

"Oh, that's John Lewes," he said, almost helplessly, gesturing a limp hand towards the skull in her hands. "He disappeared on the night of October 7th, 1940, with nine others. There wasn't enough time to look for them," he added, and then fell silent for a moment. "Not enough time, and not enough of us left to look."

"DCI Nightingale is a bit of a historian," Walid said hurriedly, to try and head off the suspicion he could see rising in Hawes. "We have the records to confirm the identities of these bodies."

"I see," Hawes said, clearly not believing him for a moment – but Abdul was willing to bet it was also more than her job's worth to keep asking questions, so she gamely carried on. "Well, there's not much for your lot, whatever lot you are, to do here – we have it well in hand, and you can count on receiving my full report as soon as our work is done. The deceased will be remanded to the custody of the police at UCH."

"Thank you," Abdul said, recognizing a true professional. "How can we be in touch if we need to ask you anything when you're finished?"

"We're off to Bosnia," Sarah said, her smile thin and tight-lipped. "Any letters you send may not get to us."

Abdul nodded, and, deep in his gut, thanked Allah that his life would spare him that opportunity. "When do you get back?"

"Who knows – there will certainly be enough graves to keep us busy. Hopefully by Christmas."

"Allah yusallmak," Abdul murmured, and she shook his hand again before she and Kevin made their careful way back up to the ground above for a well-deserved break, leaving the cellar quiet and desolate.

Thomas was still standing over the grave, seemingly oblivious to the heavy tread of the police team above them; but he noticed Abdul's presence when Walid stepped closer, and looked drawn in on himself with weariness and shame.

"I'm old, Abdul," he said quietly. "I have an old man's mind - forgetful and selfish."

"Stop now," Abdul soothed, putting his hands on Thomas's shoulders. "Your survival doesn't make you a graverobber. It just means you survived."

Thomas didn’t move, nor did he look up, for a long moment. When he did – when he reached up and covered Abdul’s hand with his own – there was a deep stillness in him, a calm which Abdul recognized as the aftereffects of deep prayer, though what Thomas had said to himself to evoke it he couldn’t guess.

"You've quieted them," Thomas said, simply. "You always have."

Abdul took Thomas's hand more firmly in his, turned away from the dead, and led them both back up into the light.

*

**TBC**

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote quite a bit of this chapter while moving thousands of miles away from my fiance for a few months. Apologies, therefore, for any noticeable evidence that I was weepy/tipsy while writing their emotional and domestic bits. ^^
> 
> There was indeed a bomb that landed on the site on Clerkenwell Road that I described (according to [Bombsight](http://bombsight.org/bombs/29131/), a project which maps the Blitz), but my madey-up bit about there being construction there in the 1990s is just that: made up. Sarah Hawes, Kevin Higginbottom, and Dr. Lewis are my OCs - because I need to know ALL about the 'mass grave people' Nightingale implies they know in _Moon Over Soho_.
> 
> Oh, and [here's that Starcastle song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC5v7Xr0eAc). If I had to suffer, you shall too. (No offence to prog rock fans obvs, it's just not for me! *G*)


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Thomas is shot, Abdul pulls receipts, and Peter kicks himself for being a blind idiot.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This part finally goes quite AU - I've mucked with the timeline of Nightingale's shooting a bit (in the book it's implied that he wasn't awake before talking to Peter) and Peter's revelations are of course specific to this fic's world. Also: I AM AN ENORMOUS SAP. You have been warned.

3

**Spring, 2011  
**

Abdul had always had mixed feelings about UCH’s move out of the Cruciform Building in the nineties. He had liked it there: he had liked the odd amalgam of thin Victorian corridors and the jumble of modern equipment, liked the narrow beams of light that were all that could make it through its windows, liked that strange connection to the past which made you think, especially in the middle of a night shift, that the city outside was wild and dangerous and that a stethoscope and a scalpel could bring civilization to its rescue. Once he’d met Nightingale, he’d realized that there were _vestigia_ and ghosts there, too – hundreds, thousands of them, packed into practically every brick, some of them more pleasant or more horrifying than others. For the most part, he’d steered clear of them – but it had been worth it, in his quiet hours, to turn a corner and think he’d seen the shade of some mustachioed, harried physician in his horn-rimmed glasses hurrying on to his next unfortunate victim.

The new UCH, all gleaming glass and steel and fluorescent lights, simply couldn’t compare at first, and the acrimoniousness of the strike that accompanied the move disrupted, almost for the first time, his firmly-held notions of what being a doctor was about. By the time he fetched up in his awkwardly-long, squeezed little afterthought of an office into which his growing number of students could barely fit even before he started carting in all his files and reference texts, he had felt thoroughly fed up with everything about it from the insignificance of the harsh overhead lighting to the vast abstract conversation about what on earth London was doing desecrating one of its finest institutions with such an architecturally disappointing hulk.

He was luckier than his colleagues, however, in that he had the chance to retreat to the Folly. Thomas put up with his gripes far more often than Abdul thought was fair in retrospect, to the point where it became a habit, and even when Abdul realized he had spent years growing perfectly happy with his makeshift little world – as a place to come back to when he went across the city in Thomas’s footsteps, as a place to remember the tethers he had to the world he knew was the most real to the life he lived – he kept up a string of mild little complaints, because every Englishman had to have a dead horse to flog, and that, at least, was an acceptable pastime for a Scotsman to pick up after almost thirty years down south.

He went back to his office after meeting Peter for the first time, and spent a few minutes staring at the nondescript ceiling with his hands behind his head, made exhausted by relief and hope and not a little bit of wonder.

He was also in his office when Thomas called him to say he was needed to help man the police’s mobile trauma team, because, as had suddenly become usual, they were planning to do something dangerous and a little bit stupid to try to catch the ghost of Henry Pyke. Abdul busied himself with the theory of how he would save a person’s life once their face had started disintegrating, and reminded himself, for comfort’s sake, as he lined up around the corner from the designated spot on Bow Street where Peter and Thomas would be waiting, that he wasn’t alone in making sure that they both came out of it alive.

The gunshot was, frankly, the last thing any of them expected, and Abdul spent an incredibly frustrating amount of time being forced flat onto the pavement with Alexander Seawoll’s heavy forearm on the back of his neck before he was cleared to get up and run like a mad thing in the direction of all the screaming.

It had been years since he’d renewed his basic trauma training, and longer still since he’d felt any sense of urgent adrenaline around his work. It kicked in regardless, turning his stomach to stone and sending a rush of bright anxiety through his veins, when he got down on his knees and found himself pressing a palm into Thomas’s blood.

“One, two, three,” one of the paramedics counted quickly, and the whole little group of them heaved Thomas onto a stretcher; Abdul stood with them and the ambulance ride that followed was loud and regimented and as efficient a safety net for his mind as he could ever imagine as he sat in a corner of the swaying vehicle with his bloodied hands between his knees.

“Theatre four, please,” the attending doctor on duty called as they arrived at UCH, and Abdul took the moment as the stretcher veered left to look Thomas up and down – he was barechested and shivering, clearly in shock despite the paramedics’ best efforts, and the remnants of his fine suit were in tatters around his bloodied back and shoulder. Later, Abdul promised himself, he’d remember to tell a joke about it.

“How is he?” he asked, plunging a hand into the mess of arms and tubes and somehow catching ahold of Thomas’s fingers as they all barreled along.

“We’ll see after surgery,” one of the paramedics said, who was working the oxygen bag attached to Nightingale’s face. “Up to him, really.”

Abdul leaned in.

"Thomas Nightingale, Master of the Folly," he said, even and urgent and not to be ignored. "We have an agreement. You will not die here today."

He knew he had been heard; he chose to interpret the sudden clutch of Thomas's fingers at his as wide-eyed, breathless acknowledgement rather than the result of a stab of pain. Abdul let go, came to a slow halt in the middle of the corridor, and watched, willing himself to remain calm with his hands clenching in the pockets of his coat, as the ambulance workers and their cargo wheeled rapidly away from him.

It was a long few hours, when Thomas was in surgery. Abdul spent them in his office for the most part, carefully cleaning his hands, performing the night prayer, resolutely keeping his mind quiet and his body busy with paperwork of the most obscure sorts, and telling himself that he was a professional and that he would trust Mackie, the frankly brilliant surgeon working downstairs, with his own life as well as Thomas's.

None of it helped, but it did pass the time. He was able to slip into the ICU around three-thirty in the morning, when it was half-lit for those sleeping and the nurses had completed their first round of making Thomas comfortable, and couldn't deny that it made his steps falter to see what he saw.

Thomas had never looked old before.

He pulled up a chair, sat, put the paper copy of the chart dangling at the end of the bed into his lap, and put a gentle hand into Thomas's palm. "How are you feeling?"

"Like I could kill for a cigarette," Thomas said instantly, looking both addled and uneasy at the fact that he felt addled, the hair at his temples matted and clammy.

"You'd blow up your oxygen tank," Abdul said, absentmindedly, as he started to page through Thomas's paperwork. "And you haven't smoked since 1991."

"Oh," Thomas rasped. There was a pause. "That's right. You told me not to."

"And you finally listened," Abdul said back, giving Thomas's wired forearm a squeeze. It had already occurred to him that there was something ancient and warlike about Thomas's response – had he smoked on his weary walk west from Ettersburg, to stay awake and concentrated on anything but his wound? – but he would never ask. "How's the pain?"

"Frightful," Thomas whispered. "Peter?"

"He's safe and sound. Giving a statement about how he broke your attacker's ankle."

Thomas almost smiled, but didn't quite make it. "Good lad."

"Is there anything you need?"

Thomas thought for a moment, his eyelids heavy. Then he looked straight at Abdul, and twitched his fingers in a way which Walid knew indicated urgency. "The Folly."

"I've heard it's to be secured until you're back on duty."

Thomas kept staring at him. "Molly."

Abdul could see it, suddenly - the house empty, Peter gone, Thomas gone. It was almost unimaginable.

"Yes," he said, pushing his chair back from Thomas's bedside and standing. "I'll go now."

"Tell her there will be a row if she insists on hot-water bottles when I get home," Thomas murmured; he was smiling now, but it didn't look like his heart was in it.

"Oh, I think you can count on finding chocolates on your pillow," Abdul grinned, and then he put the chart down and leaned over Thomas, feeling all his own relief and adrenaline starting to slip precipitously away as he put a hand to Nightingale's cheek. "I'll be back soon. I'm sure your new young man will be along presently to cheer you up."

"You're my young man," Thomas sighed, and was visibly asleep before he felt Abdul's kiss on his forehead.

***

Abdul had turned forty in 1999. He remembered it as a heady sort of time to be alive - the approach of the millennium, the young bucks of Blair and Clinton running the world, the euro coming into being, Kosovo, Columbine, the return of _Star Wars_ , and the Spice Girls all made it feel a bit like the world was indeed due to come to an end. Sarah Hawes, whom he had kept in touch with occasionally over the years, was evacuated from Belgrade (much against her will) and promptly boarded a plane to Rwanda; Lewis finally retired to his favorite mountaintop, and Higginbottom, last Abdul had heard, had gone off to try and break a world record for finding peat bog burials.

In the midst of it all, Abdul had mostly forgotten about turning a year older. When the day came, however, he found himself pausing, and the oddest, most insidious idea came into his head - that he was going to be Thomas's age, soon, and then he would surpass him.

He had dismissed it as a passing thought at the time, but it kept creeping back up on him - not least because he suspected, in the months and few years after that, that Thomas was thinking of it too. What that meant given that Abdul himself hadn't come close to forming an opinion about it, he couldn't say.

By his forty-fifth birthday, in 2004, he had come to be close enough acquaintances (of the sort that get held at arm's length) with the river goddesses – who had been very interested to learn that the wizard had pets, albeit human ones – that he arrived at the Folly that evening to find Thomas looking most uneasily at a gift-basket of British-produced wine which was sitting in the foyer. It took them about an hour to determine that they weren't booby-trapped, and for Abdul to have his one annual glass of alcohol (in the name of science, as always) and pronounce it, after a lot of tense waiting, as magically safe to consume. By that time Molly was most put out with them for letting their food get cold, and announced herself with such a pretty flounce over her newly-steaming platters piled high with the second course that it had slipped Abdul's mind what occasion they were even celebrating.

Until, that is, Thomas put down his spoon and looked at him incredibly seriously over the remains of his toffee pudding, and Abdul found himself wondering whether their life was about to come apart at the seams.

It proved to be entirely the opposite, in fact, because Thomas simply stood, looked briefly at the watch on its fob in his waistcoat pocket, and tilted his head slightly towards the door to the library. "I have something to show you, if you're willing."

***

When Abdul arrived at the Folly at around four in the morning, the house was dark but for a blazing light coming from the kitchen. Toby came skittering into the foyer, barking madly, as Abdul let himself in with his keys, and Molly was already there waiting for him, a hovering shadow in the backlit door to the scullery, her hands wringing within each other.

“Molly,” he said quietly, and her face spasmed. She had been waiting up, he realized, and she knew there was something wrong, and she fled back into the kitchen without a sound.

“Molly,” he said again, and followed quickly after her, shedding his coat, almost treading on Toby as the dog pounced around his feet. “It’s alright. I promise you it’ll be alright – he’s going to be fine – ”

He was just a little too tired, he knew. And he clearly wasn’t thinking straight as he was reminded, sharply and with not a little bit of pain, that something about the Folly and all of its inhabitants would always be a little bit alien to him – when, at the touch of his hand on her back, Molly whirled straight around from the gleaming stovetop and bit him.

Abdul couldn’t help it – he swore, and hissed through his teeth, and fell back against the long kitchen table with her still attached, seething, to his forearm. Something around the edges of his vision went blurry and dark; at their feet Toby went abruptly quiet and just quivered, open-mouthed and panting.

It took a few moments for her to still, but she did, and her eyes were wide and frightened. The slight shucking pop as her bloodied teeth slid out of his arm sounded odd and felt worse, but he was gathering ahold of himself again, and managed to remain upright enough that he could let go of his white-knuckled grip on the table’s edge with his other hand and lift it up to put his palm on her shoulder.

“It’s alright,” he said again, considerably more breathless, and then she closed her eyes and wriggled her way into his chest, cold and silent and shrinking down into calm.

It only took a few minutes to patch him up using bandages and Fucidin from the suspiciously well-stocked medicine cabinet Molly kept in a corner of the kitchen. (Abdul suspected that she had recently acquired them when Peter came into the house, though that wasn’t exactly fair to the young man.) She recovered her composure quickly, though there was still a suspicious redness around the edges of her eyes, and left him alone with a restorative and sugary cup of tea while she hurried upstairs to fill a bag with some of Thomas’s things. When she returned, it was also with a carefully-packed cardboard box under her arm: it was full of jam-jars and sheaves of paper, all full of neatly-labeled samples of tissue and hair that Abdul and Thomas had collected over the years that had never managed to make it to his stash at UCH. For a moment, Walid was confused by it – but when the knock on the door finally came as he was putting his coat back on again, his questions were rapidly answered.

Frank Caffrey was on the other side of the door, managing, as ever, to make the most serious of situations look like they would be quickly and competently handled. He just nodded when he saw Abdul, not making any surprise visible, and behind him there was a vanful of equally powerful-looking men staring up the steps to the house.

“Doctor,” he said. “I’m afraid my own agreement kicks in around now.”

“I understand,” Abdul said. He’d seen that parchment in the library, the one some awestruck squaddie in the paras had signed one day in the depths of Germany, tying his regiment and possibly his sons in perpetuity to something he didn’t really comprehend. “Are the wolves circling?”

“The bureaucracy’s not my area,” Frank said, with a shrug. “But the goddesses’ll be sniffing around soon, I reckon. You have everything you need?” he added, with a significant rise of his eyebrows.

“Yes,” Abdul replied, and turned to Molly. “Will you be okay?” he asked, softer.

She steeled herself, and nodded, and, without another word, led Toby back inside. The clunk of the door as it closed sounded final – a thought that Abdul quickly and sternly dismissed from his head.

After all, there was a significant piece of him locked away in the Folly, and he fully intended to come back and claim it.

***

Thomas had laid out a charter-like document on one of the handsome reading stands in the library by the time Abdul entered on that evening in 2004. The paper was in fact vellum, he realized as he came closer; but it had few signs of age upon it like the archives of agreements and vows he had seen in the library’s dustier corners, and the ink on it shone as though it had only just started to dry.

“I’d be grateful for your opinion,” Nightingale said. He was hanging slightly back as Abdul approached, his hands in his pockets, as though presenting a nervous child for inspection.

Abdul watched him carefully for a moment, and then stepped forward.

 _I, Thomas Nightingale_ , he read, _Master of the Folly, being of sound mind and body_ –

Abdul blinked. Well, that hadn’t been exactly what he’d expected – if he’d expected anything – and now his mind was hurrying down all sorts of very worrying, winding roads.

– _do swear to be true to the life and work of Abdul Haqq Walid, and to his protection, in return for his agreement and services to this House._

_And to this end, do swear that I shall make every endeavour to find said House a suitable successor to my duties and titles, and release them thereunto, for the further propagation of its fellowship. And that the last days of my life shall be spent in concert and congress with the aforementioned Walid, fulfilling the natural course of life in this mortal body. So help me God, my Sovereign, and the power that set the universe in motion._

In the most inappropriate of moments, Abdul wanted desperately to laugh. “You don’t believe in God,” he said.

“No,” Thomas said, sounding relieved. When Abdul turned to look back at him he was smiling, fondly, as though he had hoped to hear nothing else. “I knew that would pique your interest. The institutional language is indeed a bit old-fashioned – for that, you’ll have to blame Isaac.”

“You can’t do this.”

“I know.”

“You _really_ can’t,” Abdul insisted again. If he were to let himself be overwhelmed, he felt as though he would never be able to set foot in the Folly again. “There’s no guarantee you’ll find an apprentice. There’s no guarantee the Folly will have a new master.”

“No, there isn’t.”

“This place needs _you_ ,” Abdul said, and despite himself, in the face of Thomas’s calm his concern was slipping away no matter how hard he tried to hold onto it, replaced only by joy. “London needs you. The whole of fucking _England_ needs you.”

“And they’ll have me. For another thirty years or so.”

Abdul took a deep breath, forcing his lungs to clear. “We have no idea how your aging works. You might still be forty then.”

For the first time, he saw something fall in Thomas’s face. But it didn’t stop him; he still stepped forward, still picked up Abdul’s hand into his own.

“Perhaps,” he said, quieter. “But I don’t intend for that to be the case. And I know I can count on you to help me find a solution.”

Abdul did laugh, a disjointed sigh of disbelief. “I’m not going to figure out how to kill you.”

Thomas was motionless and thoughtful for a long moment, and Abdul wanted nothing more than to hold him – wanted it desperately, like nothing he had ever felt – but knew that he couldn’t, not yet.

“We all die, or should,” Thomas said, as calm as a millpond. “I’ve seen enough of death, and I don’t intend to continue living through much more of it.

“Least of all yours,” he finished, and finally Abdul couldn’t contain himself. He reached out, brought Thomas into him, stood there with him in the darkening library until he heard Molly’s curious creak at the door, and the house breathed out, and its master was warm and still in his grasp.

He grinned, then, into the dim evening. “Have you been watching the news recently?”

“Er,” Thomas said, sounding rather nonplussed, as they both reeled their way back from baring their souls. “No. Should I have?”

“You do realize that Parliament’s just passed a civil partnerships act, yeah?”

Thomas looked utterly baffled, and Abdul didn’t let him live it down for years.

***

Abdul checked on Thomas once more before retreating to catalogue and store his samples and catch a few hours of dazed sleep in one of the cots that had been shoved into a broom cupboard on the same floor of his office for all the hospital workers who never managed to get home. By the time morning rolled around, he found from the evidence of the duffel bags piled outside Thomas’s room (and being eyed with no little disgust by the police officer on guard) that he would have to make two coffees in the canteen rather than one, and Peter was clumsy and sweet coming out of sleep, dipping his face precipitously into the caffeine Abdul provided.

“How is he?” he asked, on the back of a yawn, as he sat up straighter in his chair and wiped at his eyes.

“He was shot in the chest,” Abdul said, taking a long sip of his own latte. “That sort of thing’s bound to slow you down.”

“But he’ll be alright?”

“I spoke with him soon after the surgery. He’s been breathing on his own all night, so that’s a good sign. Besides,” he added, making a sudden decision, “it’s a good thing I _was_ here. Thomas made clear I should go to the Folly and see Molly was settled, which I was glad to do.”

He wasn’t sure what had made him want to say it, but it felt like the right thing to do for all sorts of reasons – and so he just waited, as Peter puzzled it out.

“You have keys to the Folly?”

“For many years.” Abdul paused. “It’s in the small print of my agreement, you might say.”

Peter looked him up and down, looked at Nightingale, looked at Abdul again, and then looked at his coffee as if to say _You aren’t doing your job, mate_.

“Oh my god,” Peter said. “I’m bloody blind.”

“Drink,” Abdul smiled. “It’ll wake you up.”

Peter gulped some more latte and went red at the heat of it, staring pop-eyed at Thomas. “Really?”

“Very much so.”

“Sly bastard,” Peter said, shaking his head at the both of them. “He could’ve said. _You_ could’ve said, come to think of it.”

“I’m a religious man from a religious family,” Abdul said, grinning, “and _he_ was born five years after Oscar Wilde was imprisoned. I think you can hardly blame us for finding our closet rather comfortable, hm?”

“Oh,” Peter said, looking a bit panicked. “Right. Yeah. Fuck. Forget I said that.”

“No offense taken,” Abdul said, hoping he appeared as amused as he felt. “He is, after all, the soul of discretion.”

“Yeah,” Peter said, gentler. After a pause, he groaned, and rubbed at his forehead. “Lesley’ll want me to pay up for this one.”

“ _That_ , I don’t want to know about,” Abdul grimaced. “And speaking of Lesley – I’ve heard you’ve got a theory. It sounds like you and I have work to do.”

When it was all over, he knew it would take a long time for his mind to stop drifting, when it was unbusied, back to what it had been like to feel Lesley May’s flesh shifting beneath his hands; how small and frail she’d felt and looked as he helped carefully lever her up onto her own stretcher, and oversaw the ruin of what was left of her in the operating theatre. The Folly felt blood-soaked, of a sudden – his own in the kitchen, Lesley’s in the coach house, Thomas’s in the bed they had so often shared when he inevitably overdid it during his convalescence.

“I don’t suppose we thought it would be like this,” Thomas said one evening soon after his return home from the hospital, with his feet up on an ottoman and on top of one of Molly’s threatened hot-water bottles. At Abdul’s quizzical look across the roaring fire in the sitting room’s grate, he just tilted his head. “Our getting older.”

“No, perhaps not,” Abdul mused, thinking almost fondly of the charter gathering dust in the next room over. “Though I doubt you’d thought you’d have an apprentice with an affinity for river goddesses, either. Or that someone would get beheaded in Covent Garden. Or – ”

“Fine, I concede,” Thomas said with a smile, raising one hand in defeat. “Far be it for me to try to control the way the world turns.”

“Spoken like a true Newtonian,” Abdul grinned, and got up a few minutes later to leave. Thomas was dozing in his chair in what would probably be the most comfortable spot for him short of hauling himself slowly and painfully upstairs to bed; he could smell nutmeg and chocolate and tea wafting in from Molly’s domain in the kitchen, there was the distant sound of a football match bursting in from the television in the coach house, and Toby was slumbering in a twitching, sighing little pile next to the grate.

He could live, he decided, with this strange new world, given that everything he needed from his old world was still there.

Said old world stirred slightly as Abdul leaned over him, and half-opened his eyes. “Which goddess does Peter fancy?” he mumbled.

“Beverley Brook, if I’m not mistaken,” Abdul smiled.

“Ah,” Thomas said, and closed his eyes again. “That’s all right, then.”

 _Indeed it is_ , Abdul thought, and quietly closed the door behind him.

*

**FIN**

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I enjoyed writing this fic so much that I might want to make it a collection! Or at least, I can certainly see myself writing more bits and pieces in an AU where Walid and Nightingale have an agreement. So stay tuned, I guess? And thank you for reading!  
> :-D


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